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Researchers Forecast the Spread of Diseases Using Wikipedia

Posted by samzenpus on from the searching-sick dept.

An anonymous reader writes Scientists from Los Alamos National Laboratory have used Wikipedia logs as a data source for forecasting disease spread. The team was able to successfully monitor influenza in the United States, Poland, Japan, and Thailand, dengue fever in Brazil and Thailand, and tuberculosis in China and Thailand. The team was also able to forecast all but one of these, tuberculosis in China, at least 28 days in advance.

2 of 61 comments (clear)

  1. Re:How? by Rosco+P.+Coltrane · · Score: 3, Funny

    They made the assumption that if a disease is spreading somewhere, there people start looking for information about the disease on wikipedia

    Imagine the potential: if a lot of search logs contain "EBOL-AAAARGH", they'll know a particularly fast-acting variant of the virus has emerged.

    --
    "A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
  2. Re: 28 days in advance of later? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    Look, we're onto your game. The suggestion that you've been living under a rock was a dead giveaway that you're a zombie...